“Eunice claims that they lived together since their marriage, but then on May twenty-sixth—that was a month before you were born—he ‘cruelly abandoned’ her and she doesn’t know where he went, but he took her horse. It was a bay horse about fifteen hands high with a white spot on its forehead, about eight years old. And he took ‘one top buggy and harness.’ She says that was all worth two hundred dollars. And she says he sold them to some guys, but she claims the price wasn’t high enough and that he was in cahoots with them for the purpose of cheating her out of her property.”
My mother is listening with a frown, as if a movie has begun—one she has already seen.
“Eunice filed this the very next day after he left her—and she’s suing for alimony,” I say. “She made up her mind real quick.”
“It could have been building up to this for some time,” Mama says. “He probably never treated her right.”
“And listen to this, he took her money too. She says she had a bank account of her own money, about three hundred dollars, and that he took it all out and was planning to leave the state.”
“That was a fortune!” Mama says. “She worked hard to earn that. They always said he robbed her.”
This discovery confirms Robert Lee’s knavish character. It’s not news to Mama. I’m saddened, yet I’m pleased to find details that bring Eunice alive to my mind. She was proud, quick-tempered, saving. She owned a “top buggy.” The description of the horse is vivid. The money in the bank reveals a thrifty, cautious nature. But she wound up in this plight. She is pregnant with my mother. And Robert has run off with all her resources, leaving her alone.
“It goes on,” I say. “She says she is ‘a very poor person unable to earn a support for herself and that he is a strong able-bodied man, capable of earning a living.’ She’s suing him ‘for twenty dollars a month for the next ten years or the sum of twenty-four hundred dollars to support her in the station in life to which she is accustomed.’ She’s calling for his arrest. She says he ‘so attempts to conceal himself that summons cannot be served upon him.’ I guess that means he’s in hiding, and she knows it.” I read on. “And she’s asking for a ‘general attachment’ against his property, and she’s also suing those two guys who bought the horse and buggy from him. She’s suing them for two hundred dollars.”
“I bet she never got it.”
“There’s no record. I don’t know.”
“He never was a daddy to me,” she says.
“Her handwriting was a lot like yours,” I say, studying Eunice’s signature. The capital letters are finely drawn, with a bit more flourish than my mother’s writing, but the roundness of the letters looks familiar. “She had nice handwriting.”
“Aunt Hatt had a beautiful hand,” says Mama, as she examines her mother’s signature. “But those fits caused it to deteriorate.”
I show Mama a copy of her parents’ marriage license and see her face fall when she realizes the date of her parents’ wedding. “That can’t be,” she protests. “Oh, no.”
I realize I shouldn’t have shown her that. Quickly I go to another document I copied at the courthouse. This one is a sworn statement from the two men who bought the horse and buggy from Robert Lee. They deny all knowledge of the charges, they say they knew nothing of Robert’s notions of defrauding Eunice, and they claim the horse wasn’t worth more than forty-five dollars or the buggy worth more than fifteen.
“That’s probably as far as it went,” Mama says bitterly. “She probably didn’t get nothing out of them or him, either one. He probably got across the state line.”
Embarrassed for him and for myself, I offer excuses. “He was only a teenager,” I say. “Maybe he was just a scared kid. He wasn’t ready for a wife and child.”
“He was grown,” she says firmly. “Clausie said he was mature for his age.”
I am trying to imagine a sixteen-year-old boy—not one of today’s sullen teenagers hiding in his room with his sound system, but a self-reliant country boy—handy with tools, familiar with mules, accustomed to working alongside men. What would be on his mind, his horizons? He had no money or land. Eunice had a lot he might lust after—her full, attractive figure; her bay horse; that fine buggy; cash in the bank. He could have hung around her, impressing her with his way with a horse. Before long, he found himself in wedlock—committed to an extent he was unprepared for. When the prospect of a baby loomed too large, he abandoned his wife, escaping with her property. I run through the familiar story. But the question of blame shifts in my mind, like a kaleidoscope rotating. Eunice may have taken advantage of him—a boy. Who seduced whom? By heaping all the blame on Robert, the Hickses may have been trying to protect Eunice’s own reputation. Still, it’s not easy to forgive him, even at this late date. Back then, sixteen was a lot older than it is nowadays. But so was twenty-one.
Suddenly Mama stands up and throws out her arms triumphantly. She’s beaming. “I just remembered—I was born premature! They said I was so little they were surprised I made it! They said I didn’t cry for two months, and when I did—it liked to scared everybody to death! They said I didn’t have any fingernails or eyelashers!” She lifts her hands in a thankful hallelujah, celebrating her legitimacy. For her, believing otherwise, I see, would be unbearable.
Later, we look through the album that has the photographs of the Lees. There are several pictures of Robert Lee, taken long after he abandoned Eunice and my mother. Instead of a child groom, he is now a grown-up. He’s handsome in a flashy way, like an actor. He looks cocky, as though he has breezed in for the day from some glamorous place—Paducah, maybe—and wants to look sharp to impress the folks at home. His striped tie seems rather short, possibly because his large midriff is bulging above his belt buckle. He is about forty-two years old.
“He drank a lot,” Mama says, pausing over another one of the pictures. “He made big money—road construction, I think. Back then you could make good money on a road crew. Mary was always saying he made a lot of money but he blowed it.”
My mother and I and my baby sister, Janice, are in some of these pictures. Janice is a tiny baby, so it is 1944, probably August or September, doubtless on a Sunday afternoon, when families assembled for big dinners. The Lees, some sitting on wooden straight-chairs, are gathered under the trees in front of a small, plain, unpainted house with a porch. The roof is made of split-wood shingles, with a central chimney. Irises line a dirt driveway.
“There’s the Plymouth, one of our oddball cars,” Mama says, pointing to another picture. Several black cars and a truck with sideboards are parked under the trees. “I guess I drove it out there that day.”
“Tell me about the time we drove to Paducah to see him when I was a baby,” I urge her. She shuffles some of the loose pictures like playing cards.
Aunt Mary gave her Robert Lee’s address and urged her to find him. Mama considered this for some time. Her curiosity had been held in check by her resentment, but now and then she had a notion that maybe he loved her, a little. Finally, she acted on impulse. Her cousin Shirley Hicks, from Clear Springs, drove out one Sunday afternoon in her new car and asked Mama to go riding. Mama put on her nice dress and combed her hair. She grabbed me and a blanket and some diapers, and we hit the road. I was two or three months old.
Paducah was a long, leisurely drive, and the weather was good. They played the radio. They honked at other Sunday afternoon joyriders. Mama liked being with Shirley, who had a spontaneous, warmhearted nature.
As they drew into the outskirts of the city, Mama grew nervous. What would she say to him? Maybe he wouldn’t be at home. She had an idea he might be living in a slum, down by the riverfront. They stopped at a filling station and asked directions. The house was not far into town, near the train yard. They drove past the Illinois Central train-repair shops, where black locomotives resembling giant grasshoppers squatted menacingly. She expected they would get lost, but Shirley found the street without difficulty. When they located the house, they
stopped in front of it and sat there for a while, until it got too hot to stay in the car. They went to the front door. Immediately, he answered her tentative knock.
“We found him at home, with that woman he was living with,” Mama tells me. “She had a little girl with her.” She assumed the child wasn’t Robert Lee’s, because Mary had not mentioned her.
My mother was rattled, meeting her father for the first time. But she had a way of being forward and blunt.
He was uneasy. He spoke hesitantly. They talked in non sequiturs.
“He just squirmed,” she says. “I think he was put out that we come. He was nervous. He didn’t know he was a grandpa—he was still a real young man.”
Here she was, out of the blue, reminding him of his shameful past. And she sprang a baby on him, the grandchild he didn’t know he had. I can imagine him standing there as if exposed—living in sin, wholly unprepared for his daughter’s arrival. Perhaps he wondered what demands she might make on him. Maybe the woman he was living with didn’t even know he had a grown daughter.
“The little girl was laying up on a bed in the next room with her shoes on, a-playing,” Mama says. “I thought that was awful. I’d never seen any child on a bed with shoes on. That stuck in my mind.”
They went outside presently and sat in the yard at the side of the house. It was a main street, and there was some traffic. After a while, he sent the little girl after ice cream. He tried to make sense of the baby in my mother’s lap.
“He just looked at you and talked to you,” Mama says. “But he wouldn’t pick you up; he never held you. He didn’t know what to say to you or how to make over a baby.” My mother resented his lack of demonstrative affection, as if it made him inhuman.
“Go back,” I say. I have a hundred questions. “I’m trying to see this scene.”
As I pepper her with questions, I can tell she is thinking hard. “Yes, there was grass in the yard; it was mowed. It wasn’t growed up. I can’t remember seeing any trees. I don’t remember if he had a car. It was a big house, one of those two-story houses built close together, kind of narrow—a gun-barrel house, it was called. It was an old-timey house with a porch. No, I don’t know how long he had lived there. The place where he lived was on the first street past the train yard—behind a brickyard. It was all battered up, down in there. The house wasn’t painted. It was wood—gray and weathered.”
Each detail has been wrested from her with a question. She strains, probing the past, trying to visualize it. I know her memory must be vague, but some images loosen from the vapor and shine clear.
“What were they wearing?” I ask her.
“Not work clothes—they were cleaned up. They weren’t dirty or ragged. Pretty good clothes. Sunday clothes, I guess.”
“Do you remember what colors?”
She’s exasperated with me. Why do I want to know such trifles?
“O.K.,”she says, slapping the album down on the coffee table. “If that’s the kind of thing you want to know. He had on tan pants and a light tan shirt. The woman was a lot shorter than him and had dark hair and had on a dark dress with white specks or flowers. The little girl had on frilly things. They wore ruffles and pinafores back then.”
“Amazing!” I say. “Now I can see them. Like pictures.”
“Oh, you’re straining my little watery brain,” she says with a moan. “All this talk. You make so much out of the least little thing.” But she laughs then.
“Were you glad you went?” I ask.
She pauses. “There was something in me that told me I had to talk to him. I had to find him. And so I did. And I saw we had nothing in common. I knew he didn’t want me. When I was growing up, they wouldn’t let me have anything to do with him, but after I went out on my own, they couldn’t stop me. It was just something I wanted to do, just see him and talk to him. Wilburn never said anything about us going down there to see him. I think I slipped off.”
When she sighs, I hope it is a sigh of release, not pain.
Even though it had been a clumsy meeting, the ice was broken, and an acquaintance of sorts began. Soon after that trip to Paducah, Mary brought Robert Lee out to our farm for a Sunday afternoon. Mama helped Granny fix dinner for them. I imagine Robert awkwardly, tentatively, trying to respond to the opening his daughter created that day in Paducah.
“The menfolks stood around and talked,” Mama tells me. “You know how men are—if they’ve got a big job they want to talk about it. They want to talk about money. He bragged about all the money he was making.”
She didn’t go out of her way to talk to him, and he hung back from her. I suspect he talked about money to impress her. He was showing her he had made his way out of poverty. For him, this would have been an enormous achievement—a boy with no prospects who had married too young, made mistakes, been driven away to pay for his mistakes, and then managed to do well despite it all. But I’m struck by his boorishness. He had robbed his wife—and by extension, his daughter. Any success he’d gained had come at their expense. The family’s grievance always focused on his thievery. Yet here he was, the granddaddy of deadbeat dads, dwelling on the topic of money.
Mama doesn’t remember talking to him that day, or ever talking with him to any extent, even though she was around him on a number of occasions during the next four years. “I didn’t want much to do with him,” she tells me now. “But the day I took you to Paducah—I knew I just had to meet him. He was so flabbergasted, he was speechless. But I decided I didn’t need anything more from him. And I was satisfied with that.”
From what I can find out, Robert Lee worked on the river when he was young, in the 1920s. He worked on a towboat as a laborer—anything from cook to deckhand. I imagine that after stealing Eunice’s property he may have made his way across the river to Missouri or Arkansas. Working on the river, then, might have followed naturally. I picture him as a rowdy and randy young squirt, ready to engage the world. He strutted and bragged; he was sexually attractive; he knew the ways of the world, knowledge he gained on his visits to Vicksburg, Memphis, Cairo—all the river towns where he might have docked and gone on sprees. He wouldn’t have retired to his room and read a book. From what I have heard, he was loud, rude, impetuous, adventurous, abusive to women. I imagine him exploding with obscenities, going into drunken rages. He would be in a whorehouse; he would be in bars, maybe in fights. He would always be looking for a chance—to test his skills, to pick up some change, to see what there was to see. He roamed and explored and caroused. A big hotheaded, hard-living son of a bitch. My grandfather.
After Eunice died, or maybe after she remarried, he would have made his way home to see his family. Visiting his parents at Clear Springs, Robert hung out at the store with his brother, worked with horses, did farm labor. He helped his father split shingles. He could work with his hands like an artist. The river was far away and foreign to this little community, so being a boatman probably seemed romantic. One of the neighbors gave Robert a nickname. He called Robert “Record,” from the song “Steamboat Bill.”
Steamboat Bill, steaming down the Mississippi
Is going to beat the record of the Robert E. Lee.
In the song, Steamboat Bill, pilot of the Whippoorwill, tries to out-race the redoubtable Robert E. Lee, the fastest steamboat on the Mississippi. But Steamboat Bill’s boiler explodes from the fury of the race and now he’s “a pilot on the ferry in the Promised Land.”
I’m attracted to the idea of Robert Lee as a riverman. A rambler, a gambling man, a wanderer. No one else in my family that I know of ever strayed far from farm life, unless Daddy’s Navy voyage counts. For generations, all the forebears I can name were farmers. But here was a principal figure in my immediate family cruising down the river. I try to picture Robert Lee on a towboat, steering barges of coal through the great confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers at Cairo, Illinois, the place where Huckleberry Finn’s raft misses the turn toward freedom for the slave Jim. Robert Lee might have travele
d all the way to Pittsburgh or St. Louis or New Orleans. I study the map. Could he have gone on the Missouri River to Omaha—“way yander to Newbraskie”?
My imagination is steaming down the river. I could hop onto Huckleberry Finn’s raft, or Robert Lee’s towboat—whatever’s going.
Robert Lee died not many months after the Sunday afternoon in 1944 when we all had our picture taken together. My parents received a telegram asking them to meet the body at the depot. Our address had been found on a scrap of paper in his pocket. Daddy had given him the address some time before and Robert was still carrying it with him.
Mama is not sure where her father died, but she thinks it may have been in Mississippi, where he had gone on a job—maybe on a road crew. She said the workers were sheltered in tents, in cold, rainy weather. He didn’t come out of his tent for two days, and when someone eventually checked on him, he was delirious with fever. He was carried to a hospital, but he soon died.
“He took double pneumony,” Mama says. “I don’t believe there was any penicillin then.”
I wonder about all the pneumonia I had as a child—some of it without benefit of penicillin. How my mother must have worried over me, fearing I would die from the same disease that killed her father.
“The funeral was out at his mama and daddy’s house,” Mama says. “But before that, he was laid out for the public at a funeral home in Mayfield. Thelma, my half-sister, and me was the only ones there,” Mama says. “Nobody knew about it, I guess. And that woman he lived with couldn’t have come there because they weren’t married. Thelma and me just set there. We didn’t cry. He wasn’t a daddy to either one of us. I didn’t have any feelings. He made big money, but he never spent a penny on me. I got him a floral spray for seven-fifty. Back then you could get a big standing spray for seven-fifty. But it was still a lot of money.”
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